Tuesday’s Washington Times headlined, “Immigrants children lured to terror: Identity often difficult for 2nd generation.”

The topic of the troubled second generation, particularly in Islamic families, is one that I’ve examined over time, recently in Government Screening Won’t Stop Second Generation Jihad. In that case, a Silicon Valley executive Sal Shafi contacted authorities because he feared his son, Adam (pictured), had turned jihad and was about to leave to join ISIS. Legal difficulties ensued.

The case was an extreme version of teen development where rejection of the parents’ values is felt as the right way forward to become an individual. Of course, the human brain is not fully developed until age 25 or thereabouts, so some adolescent choices can turn out to be bad ones.

Immigrant teens experience extra stress in the construction of who they believe themselves to be. Immigrant kids are not completely American nor entirely their parents’ tribe. As a result, many associate with others of the same demographic and form gangs based on ethnicity.

Muslim youth face a more consequential choice. The ISIS beheading gang claims to offer “true” Islam, not the watered-down or assimilated version of the parents, which provides a welcoming identity clubhouse to searchy young people.

he Washington Times article names a couple recent examples of second generation assimilation failures; I have reported on others in addition to the Shafi family. One was the son of Albanian immigrants Betim Kaziu was sentenced in 2012 to 27 years in the slammer for plotting to murder US soldiers overseas. Another was Mohamed Mohamud, a young Somali who plotted to bomb a Portland Oregon Christmas celebration, whose father (an engineer at Intel) contacted authorities with worries that his son was becoming radicalized.

The problem of second generation radicalization shows that immigration screening of the first generation does not protect America from danger. Islam can act like a recessive gene, becoming active in later generations to kill. Understanding this point means the prudent policy for American national security should be Zero Muslim immigration, period.

While immigrants draw much of the attention, it’s their children who are proving to be the most fruitful recruiting ground for radical jihad in the U.S., accounting for at least half of the deadly attacks over the past decade.

The latest instance of the second-generation terrorist syndrome played out in Orlando, Florida, over the weekend when Omar Mateen, son of immigrants from Afghanistan, went on a jihad-inspired rampage, killing 49 people and wounding 53 others in the worst mass shooting in U.S. history.

Authorities said Mateen had flirted with other terrorist groups but declared his allegiance to the Islamic State on Sunday morning as he began his horrific spree.

He follows in the footsteps of Syed Rizwan Farook, one of the San Bernardino, California, terrorists who was the son of Pakistanis; Nadir Soofi, one of two men who attacked a drawing competition in Garland, Texas, last year and whose father was from Pakistan; and then-Maj. Nidal Hassan, the child of Palestinian immigrants whose shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009 set off the modern round of deadly lone-wolf attacks.

In other cases, attackers were immigrants brought to the U.S. as young children. They grew up in the U.S. but were besieged by questions of identity.

“Historically, the ‘high stress’ generation for American immigrants has been second generation,” said former CIA Director Michael V. Hayden. “Mom and Pop can rely on the culture of where they came from. Their grandchildren will be (more or less) thoroughly American. The generation in between, though, is anchored neither in the old or in the new. They often are searching for self or identity beyond self.” ...

While we spend a lot of time yakking about vetting the first generation of Muslim migrants to America, it is pretty clear it is the second generation we need to be worried about. So much for America’s much ballyhooed magical melting pot!

When I saw this article yesterday at the Washington Timesby Stephen Dinan entitled: ‘Ultimate sleeper cell: U.S.-born kids of immigrants are fertile jihadist recruiting grounds.’ I immediately thought of a report we featured here at RRW in our first year—2007—about how multicultural, highly diverse neighborhoods don’t bring about community cohesion, but, in fact, weaken bonds between people in their neighborhoods...

Granted Mohammed’s call to kill infidels is pretty strong, but what if it is especially appealing to those who are completely mentally destabilized by having no cultural roots. Don’t get me wrong, I am not making excuses. But, I’m trying to say that human nature is such that we need roots. We need people around us who share the same culture, the same values, the same history, who grew up just like we did!

What if forced multiculturalism is so disruptive that latching on to Islamic supremacism is the only way these jihadists find stability (and Islamic leaders know it and exploit this insecurity).

The Islamist leaders (like CAIR) don’t really want to live in a diverse society any more than some of us do. They are just more crafty in how they present their views because they are assuming they will win in the end through migration and by using our political process and the new American caliphate will be born eventually. Why bother letting their Leftwing political friends know the truth now.

Back to the 2007 report…..

The report I’m thinking of is this one—Robert Putnam’s ‘Bowling with our own.’ (2007 article by John Leo,here):

Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, is very nervous about releasing his new research, and understandably so. His five-year study shows that immigration and ethnic diversity have a devastating short- and medium-term influence on the social capital, fabric of associations, trust, and neighborliness that create and sustain communities. He fears that his work on the surprisingly negative effects of diversity will become part of the immigration debate, even though he finds that in the long run, people do forge new communities and new ties.

Putnam’s study reveals that immigration and diversity not only reduce social capital between ethnic groups, but also within the groups themselves. Trust, even for members of one’s own race, is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friendships fewer. The problem isn’t ethnic conflict or troubled racial relations, but withdrawal and isolation. Putnam writes: “In colloquial language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’—that is, to pull in like a turtle.”

In the 41 sites Putnam studied in the U.S., he found that the more diverse the neighborhood, the less residents trust neighbors.

That is about as far as I’m willing to go with this (I hate long esoteric discussions!) and besides I’m not saying anything new, others have said it better than I can.

Calling Donald Trump!

I do want to direct you (and The Donald) to an excellent suggestion penned by Daniel Pipes in 2013. He had the completely novel idea of resettling refugees in their own CULTURAL ZONES. We wrote about it here, and said this:

Immigration restriction advocates are always on the defense when dealing with the open borders agitators demanding we should be “good” people and let ’em all in. Pipes has a suggestion—and we should all be promoting it in the media and with our US Senators and Members of Congress—resettle Muslim refugees in their own “culture zone” which Pipes calls “Arabia.”

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